Navigating Audience Delivery in A Streaming World

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As the SVP of Agency and Advertiser Development, Alan leads Pandora’s collaborations with advertising agencies and brands, providing strategic counsel to marketers and leveraging feedback from agencies and brands to help Pandora build attractive and innovative products.

Alan came to Pandora with nearly 20 years of experience in the media industry, having delivered strategic leadership, vision and insight to some of the most prominent brands worldwide. Prior to Pandora, Schanzer served as Chief Client Officer at Undertone Networks, where he worked with leading companies to create customized, cross-screen advertising solutions. Before joining Undertone, Alan was Managing Partner at MEC Interaction, where he worked with leading brands including AT&T, Citibank, Xerox, Campbell’s, Colgate, Paramount, Range Rover and Jaguar.

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The audio ecosystem is shifting, which means marketers must sharpen their strategy and media plans as consumption behaviors diversify and new challenges emerge. With the growing increase in streaming, the prioritization of and mastering audience delivery is key, writes, Alan Schanzer, SVP of Agency and Advertiser Development at Pandora.

Advertisers have spent a decade talking about where and why people are consuming music and how audio consumption impacts message receptivity. Podcasts, spoken word, and the connected home are now seizing the limelight. Finding a way to break through new challenges presented by changing consumer behaviors should be a priority for every marketer.

The industry has seen a growing increase in streaming, which has changed the overall landscape of media consumption and spurred a rapid evolution of listening and viewing habits. To remain competitive, brands need to start prioritizing and mastering audience delivery in a streaming world. We’re observing that 1 in 2 Americans stream audio weekly and we expect that to increase as screenless devices become more popular. Streaming also provides a safe harbor against four common challenges that stem from the vast amounts of content and platforms available to marketers today:

Quality:

Quality is a major concern for advertisers today, from the quality of content, to fraud impressions, viewability, and data efficacy. Streaming environments deliver ads that are professionally produced, visible (and audible) with very low fraud. The user base is logged-in unlocking 1st party data derived from the registration process and ongoing observations of what users do on the platform.

Attention:

Users either tune in or tune out when they’re exposed to ads. Naturally, advertisers want assurance that their ads are being noticed. Streaming platforms are able to deliver listener attention to advertisers at scale. For example, we serve visual ads only when we know a user is looking at or engaged with the player. When it comes to streaming audio, we’re delivering a message directly into the ears of a targeted audience, with or without their eyes on the screen.

Avoidance:

Before, consumers would channel surf to avoid ads. Now, people will sign up for subscriptions to pay for an ad-free experience. When evaluating streaming services, it’s critical that advertisers look at the addressable size of an audience, or the percentage of total users who are actually receiving ads.

Fragmentation:

It’s hard to reach a massive, addressable audience at scale. Scale is a factor nationally when trying to reach large segments of the population and locally where populations’ bases tend to be small. The effective application of data-driven targeting is dependent on scale to find audiences that fit a targeting segment through meaningfully sized match rates.

Today, about 160M people are using streaming audio in the U.S. When compared to how much time is spent with other media, audio consumption is experiencing a significant increase year-over-year and breaks down into two primary sources: subscription (paid, non-advertising supported) and free, ad-supported content.

With the growth of ad-supported streaming audio, advertisers now have a new way to reach consumers in brand safe, scalable and highly accountable environments. These audiences are well-connected and tend to consume less media in general. Brands can reach consumers through personalized connections directly into people’s daily lives, activities and important moments. Through earbuds, one-on-one connections are made as close to the imagination as possible. Through connected home and connected cars, listening and social moments present an opportunity that can be leveraged through the application of creative best practices. Moments that matter to people should matter to marketers.

Just eighteen months ago, the connected home was not part of a media plan. Today, over one-quarter of US consumers have more than three Smart Home devices.

The industry and consumers at large are in the early stages of understanding the impact voice-activated devices have on behaviors and advertising. Individuals are streaming more content and spending less time watching television. The increase in time spent on connected, mostly in-home devices, will impact consumption of other in-home media, furthering the importance of streaming audio as a complement to lighter TV viewers and even cord-cutters.

As display advertising loses hand, brands will transition to wielding their ad capital toward distribution platforms that complement and enhance the user.